Polymer Clay Daily

Dialogue


These recent works by Jeffrey Dever at Mano Gallery round out the week. Like yesterday’s artist, Jeffrey starts with organic shapes and translates them. Says Dever, "My quest is not to replicate God’s finest gifts of flora and fauna, but merely to enter into the dialogue."

You need to see and touch Dever’s works to appreciate his craftsmanship. The patterns and lines are not surface decoration or paint, but carved or incised details backfilled with contrasting colors of clay, cured at each stage. An individual piece can easily go through 20 to 30 fabrication/curing cycles and take weeks to complete.

French Ones

I love the interplay of the gradations on this piece by Catherine Verdiere from Le Havre, France featured on her Ethno-Polymere blog. There’s a wealth of novel ideas and clever solutions on her site.

And her French/English translations are a real help. I’ll have to figure out how she does that. (Oh, she translates it herself since she’s an English teacher! Nice to be bilingual.) Nothing like a lovely new discovery from Susan Rose to shake me out of the doldrums.

Mysterious Ones

It seemed like a good day for simplicity and I was drawn to these photo-transfers on polymer clay pendants which are threaded onto ball chains. There’s something very appealing about the designs and the straightforward execution.

The artist, who works in textiles as well as polymer, is from Ypsilanti, Michigan and can be found on multiple sites (etsy, myspace, flickr, etc.) under "suchprettycolors." Her web sites are long on chic and short on details. Enjoy.

Leftovers

Susan Rose made these lovely vessels out of the leftovers from her extrusions class. What a wonderful use of materials.

If you haven’t wandered around in her polymerclaynotes site recently, you’ll want to revisit it. Every time I turn around there’s some fabulous germ of an idea or tool or technique that has totally eluded me. Very inspiring!

Turkish Art


Alev Gözonar is a polymer clay artist from Istanbul, Turkey. While the site’s a little wonky to wander around in and the language left me clueless, it’s a terrific presentation and a nice look at the surprisingly modern polymer clay art sensibilities of another culture. Simple canes and clay work are displayed in an artful and unusual way. If you click on her press section, you’ll see great magazine clippings of her work.

Thanks for Judy Dunn for forwarding this along.

Raw Clay

We sometimes focus only on the safe and ornamental side of polymer clay art. The Extreme Craft blog often looks at more raw and edgy works where we found Canadian artist Shary Boyle.

Boyle uses the "dainty" arts to amplify her own themes of sexuality, transgression, and secret and disturbing worlds that lie beneath the surface. She’s recently moved beyond her porcelain figures into the world of polymer clay, which allows her more spontaneity. Critical, enchanting and at times humorous, Boyle’s work is raw with human vulnerability and dysfunction.

She lives and works in Toronto, spreading her talents between drawing, painting, making projections for musicians like Bonnie Prince Billy and Sonic Youth.

A solo show featuring seven years of Shary’s miniatures will be shown at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery. Read more about her art in this "Broken Pencil" article. Have an exciting weekend.

New Possibilities

These chunky diva art bangles are from Steven Ford and David Forlano at Charon Kransen Arts. A tour through their slide shows some other new works that look like a significant departure from earlier work with more reliance on metals and other materials. Susan Rose found the link.

Correction: Dan Cormier couldn’t believe his eyes at Ford/Forlano’s work. And he was right. Steven says the gallery attributed several pictures of someone else’s work to them (the enamel and metal works in the slide show). Thanks to Dan for the detective work.

Your new work? The National Guild folks remind us that you have until April 1 to submit your best new work to the guild’s "Progress & Possibilities" juried exhibit. Welcome and good luck to the new officers of the NPCG who have great plans to move the guild forward this year.

Beauty

Klew's palette is right in season. Here she's taken one of her lovely focal beads and surrounded it with stones and beads covered with seed beads (click on the image for a larger view since I haven't described it adequately). She calls it "Serendipity." It's new and a lovely thing to behold.

Klew says she's adding more of her work to her web site so be sure to browse there.

Fall Winters

Elise Winters has added some delicious new work to her site. What a great way to start your week. I'm particularly fond of her undulating cuff bracelets.

Elise also participated in one of Craftcast's podcasts. The half hour show starts slowly but it's worth persisting (or fast-forwarding) to the second half when Elise talks about envy, inspiration and pricing.

Elise is a spokesperson for the Englewood Hospital Breast Cancer Walk for Awareness on October 22. As a thank you, Elise sends donors a small polymer clay pink ribbon pin.